Friday, September 16, 2011

In History, we started talking about the Ancient Greeks this week. I *think* we can finish with the Greeks this week and move on to the Ancient Romans starting next week. We read two books full of information about the history and culture of ancient Greece - Ancient Greece Revealed, and Ancient Greece from the Eyewitness Books series. Both are published by DK. One of the things I like best about DK books are the photos and illustrations.

We also read Ancient Greek Civilization by Cleo Kuhtz and Hazel Mary Martel. This series is interesting because it alternates a page of information about the culture and history with a page of myth or legend. For instance, a page of information about dress and clothing in ancient Greece is followed by the myth of Arachne the Weaver. Throughout, as I read the myths, we commented on how ridiculous (and sometimes gross!) these beliefs were.

This morning we finished off our study of ancient Greece by reading from The Seven Wonders of the World by Ron Tagliapietra. We looked only at the sections on the statue of Zeus at Olympus, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the Colossus of Rhodes. This book is very interesting because it is written by a BJU Press author who not only gives lots of factual information about the various wonders, but does so through story (some fictional, some based on true accounts), and provides background into New Testament times and insight into God's sovreignty over history.

And we are also working on The Wanderings of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliff, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. This inspires lots of comments and expressions of "did people actually believe this stuff?" but it's an interesting story. This will take another week to finish, I'm sure.

Our music study is A Young Scholar's Guide to the Composers, so we read each week's lesson aloud. This week was on Renaissance Music.

And our Science is God's Design: Properties of Ecosystems, which also involves reading aloud. This week we finished the first unit with a lesson on the oxygen and water cycles, and today started the second unit with a lesson on biomes.

1 comments:

[...] Landon and Kennady worked on ancient Greece in History. We read about their history, daily life, clothing, trade and agriculture, entertainment and arts, and warfare. We read several short story versions of Greek myths, and commented on how strange and weird many of them seemed to us. We modeled and sketched Greek-style columns, and I was hoping we would be able to paint some pottery in Greek style, but we didn’t get to that. I may not bother with it at all – we’ll see. We’ve been working our way through a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey as a read-aloud. [...]